


"One O'Clock Jump"

by RembrandtsWife



Series: On Vinyl [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Background Relationships, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Character Study, Dancing, Gen, Implied Relationships, Inspired by Music, Paris (City), Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 16:01:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6861976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RembrandtsWife/pseuds/RembrandtsWife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Paris, Steve can still hear the music he grew up with. He's still waiting for a dance partner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"One O'Clock Jump"

**Author's Note:**

> I heard "One O'Clock Jump" on Pandora one morning and it stuck in my head until I began to write this fic. Along with the rest of this series, it's dedicated to my dad, from whose reminiscences I have liberally stolen. Thanks to [DizzyRedhead](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DizzyRedhead) for beta.
> 
> When Steve thinks of his use of French as "apache", he's using period French slang for lower-class, "street", gangster. The guys in the movies with black berets and red bandanas? They're apaches (pronounced "ah-PASH").

Paris in some places looked very much as it had during the war, only without the Nazis everywhere. The French still smoked the same foul cigarettes and drank the same black coffee; the streets would have stunk like a skunk, as Bucky used to say, if it hadn't been for the patisseries everywhere, the smell of rich pastries and baking bread. Sam had been complaining about gaining weight. "Run faster," Clint said.

It also felt uncomfortably, in some places, like Paris during the war. Steve saw clusters of women with their heads covered, walking rapidly and trying to keep their children inside their perimeter, heard some of the same things tossed after them that he'd heard directed at Jews during the war. The headlines and magazines covers decried "Islamification", if he was translating it right, but who were the occupiers here? The Muslims had come as immigrants, not invaders.

There was still jazz in Paris, though. There was still art and culture and incredible food and wine and all the things he hadn't had time to appreciate when he passed through during the war, a wide-eyed kid from Brooklyn dressed in shorts and tights and carrying a tin shield, and later a red-white-and-blue soldier whose motley team couldn't have sat down for a meal together in most parts of the great United States. The funny thing was, seventy years and change later and he still didn't have time to stop and take it all in the way he wanted to.

Sharon had put him in touch with old friends of Peggy's, a literally old friend whose son and his family had a farm not far from the city. They had room to put up a few rogue superheroes for a little while without anybody noticing. Wanda's French turned out to be better than his own, more schoolbook and a lot less apache, but it was coming back to him, what he'd picked up from Jones and Dernier. He spoke enough to do some shopping and to find a little club in Montmartre that played the old tunes the old way, the way he remembered them. There were girl singers who dressed their hair like Peggy's and crooned like Marlene Dietrich, and the waitresses wore stockings with seams up the back. 

You couldn't fit a big band in this tiny little space, but the combo they had really knew how to swing. Steve remembered hearing an Army jazz band play while he and his men were on leave; a small group, really good, and like his team, they were integrated, although they didn't use that word back then. The Wolfpack, they were called; he found out later that the tall, skinny lieutenant who was their pianist and bandleader, a fella named Brubeck, had had quite a career after his tour.

As soon as the piano's first notes cut through the smoke and chatter of the club, Steve recognized the tune. He'd never got to hear Basie play live, but all the USO girls had records, Basie, Ellington, Glenn Miller, Goodman. Bucky never lost his love of dancing, but he never passed it on to Steve, not for lack of trying. The truth was that his old hearing troubles had made it hard to keep a rhythm, while his small size meant he only learned to follow on the dance floor while Bucky led. If he'd gotten that dance with Peggy, he might have asked her to lead. She could probably have done it.

He sat now in his booth at the back of the room, one heel keeping time on the floor though he wouldn't get up and dance. That was what they used to mean by a jitterbug--the guy who didn't dance but just jittered along with the music. Wanda had come with him the other night and tried to get him to dance. She'd had to get up and dance by herself, the kind of freeform dancing most people did nowadays, swaying and weaving and trying to catch the little threads of scarlet magic that kept drifting off her hair and out of her hands. He could only imagine how light on his feet Pietro would have been, how pretty Wanda would look spinning in and out of Bucky's arms. When he thought of Bucky before the war, he thought of him dancing. 

The Basie tune ended. People drifted back to their seats as the singer came to the mike. When she began singing a Gershwin song, Steve tossed a few euros on the table and slipped out into the night, with the song trailing after him: "The Rockies may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble, they're only made of clay…."

Maybe, someday, he'd bring Bucky back here and they could finally dance together.


End file.
